printing with a car, instead of a printing press!!..yes you did read that correctly.

The lake scene linocut was bothering me, for two reasons, The image needed tidying up as I wasn't keen on how the sky looked, but the bigger issue was that I don't have a printing press and burnishing an image of this size just wasn't working out...

I have spent all morning googling making printing presses, they are all too large for the space that I have available and a bit too big of an undertaking when I would only use it once in a blue moon, In the back of my head I had remembered something about printing with a car, there is a good youtube video of this (which I now cannot find!), but using what looks like a woodcut, rather than a lino cut...

nothing ventured, nothing gained, I have a car, I don't have a printing press. So it was time to cobble something together..

I glued the lino block onto a thin piece of ply, but that exhausted the supply of ply, scratching my head, I found an old plastic chopping board, thick and robust.

 To (try and) make sure that the paper didn't shift while it was printing, I made a hinge out of duct-tape (are you thinking McGyver yet?)

 The stack for printing went board+linocut, paper, two blankets to pad it out a little, these were cut from an old woolen blanket, I tried with both one and two layers and it didn't make much difference.

 And then under the front wheel of the car, with the hinge towards the wheel, to miminise movement.

 This was the first attempt, I realised that either I need fatter tyres on the car, or I needed to reposition the stack and go over it a few times.

This is the final print, for this one I ran the car over six times, three times across the width X 2.

If you look really closely at the print, there was a little movement of the image, but I am very happy with this.

The side had a little bit of ink 'missing, so I did a little bit of touching up here and there.